Rules for Dating my Teenage Niece

No. Just no.

I will make an exception when she is 24 and marries Ed Sheeran and they give me little ginger great nieces and nephews.

In all seriousness…

Rule #1- You hurt her I will hunt you down. Now her parents may make an empty threat to scare you but I am her crazy Aunt. Try me.

Rule #2- She can like you but I will never like you, she is MY Princess, not your bae which isn’t even a word.

Rule #3- She is a person not a conquest. Treat her as such.

Rule #4- I am everywhere. Seriously pull your pants up kid.

Rule #5- Refer to Rules 1-4

I’m not ready for boys or dating and I would like to lock her in her room until she is 24 but that’s not going to happen so I guess I will have to accept it but to all future boys that seek to date her I will have a 50 page application waiting for you. 

Tap tap, anyone here?

Wow so good thing I wasn't leaving a cliff hanger in my last blog. Let's recap the past couple of months:

YAY: Went to Antigua with mom.


BOO: Fell off horse in Antigua. Seriously my horse was an asshole, I would lead her away from tree branches and she would walk back into them. I swear she tried to drown me in the ocean. Falling off at the end was just the icing on the cake. 

YAY: Patriots won the Superbowl!!

BOO: We got like 908 feet of snow this winter. Ok maybe like 850 feet.

YAY: I bought a treadmill to train again

BOO: I fell down concrete steps at work and got banged up. Did I mention I tripped on rock salt and fell down the stair. That takes talent people!!!

So new year new goals right?

I talked my friend Lisa into a 1/2 marathon in October, We're pretty much pretending we've never run before and are training from scratch. It's super fun, right Lisa? Actually it hasn't been too bad but there are some days I just look at the treadmill and all I an say is 

But then I think of Lisa and I get on and run, after all it was my idea, but we get a MEDAL and BEER! 


It's almost baseball season which as a Red Sox fan is going to be great or painful, I got a mini package this year and I'll probably pop in some other games. After the winter we've had we better have a good summer!

Marathon Monday is in a few weeks, pretty excited I know a ton of people running so after the Sox game Lisa and I are going to plant ourselves and yell at people who are running twice the distance we will be, oh and we might be drinking beer. 

I also gave up peanut butter for Lent. I dream about peanut butter. This is pretty much our relationship.

So I promise to blog with fun stories. I mean training for a 1/2 marathon is SUPER fun! Along with healthy eating and all that blah blah crap! And you know tripping and falling along the way…

Do good things people!

I suck at blogging

Apparently I haven't blogged since February. Some people have noticed....

I'm going to do better. I have all kinds of injuries and fun stories from the year. Clearly I'll never get my book completed at this rate.

So stayed tuned kids. Big things are coming!!

I know I can't believe all the excitement either!!

Upcoming Runs! Hooray!

I’m getting back in the swing of things. Some days I’m still hard on myself about running but I am who I am and I’m going further than anyone on the couch! SO THERE! I have to say that I’m not really looking forward to the Shamrock Shuffle, my own reasons, one that are probably a coward’s way out, but I will blame Iceland on my slow if I show up performance. Not feeling it!

                                                    Oh whoops I forgot!

Once Heather pops out my new nephew (ok I’ll let her recover too!) we’ll train for the B.A.A 5k which is April 19 in Boston. It’s 2 days before the marathon and the course will take us across the Boston Marathon finish line as well. I’ve run in Boston a lot, but I think this run will be different.  I think there is a lot of emotion and love for a city behind this run. They opened the field to 10,000 so it’s kind of a big deal. 

The Color Vibe is coming to Manchester on April 27^th! The Mind Ninjas are at it again and I am sure no one will leave with any white left on their clothes. I’d appreciate no rain because that just really made for a miserable clean up! So sunny vibes!

I am most excited about the Hollis Fast 5k because my 6 year old super niece Adalee is going to be running with me. I keep telling her I hope I can keep up with her. It’s a downhill race and I thought it would be something special we could do together! So I’ll just chase her the entire time and probably have my best time ever!

                                                        He gets me

July is the Run to Home Base, which I am lucky enough to be sponsored by my company but I am still choosing to fundraise because it is an amazing cause! I missed out last year and while I’m not overly happy it’s in the middle of July I’ll take it! It’s still a cool feeling to run across home plate at Fenway Park! Or maybe I'll do this! 

Heather and I are trying to decide on a mud run, but so far it seems as if there is nothing at the time we want or that we can both do or that didn’t try to kill me (Spartan Run I’m talking to you!) We’ll see what we end up doing. Every race has its ups and downs so it’s a matter of finding something that fits “us”. The last thing we want to do is hate it!

I’m not going to lie when I say a nice shiny medal or good bling really help motivate me! And beer and cupcakes....mmmm cupcakes!

Daily Mantra:  “Focus and finish.”

An Open letter to running...

Dear Running,

I feel like we need to talk. It’s been a rough year for us. You were there but I didn’t appreciate you the way I should of. I lost my passion for you. And then someone came along and I thought it would help me find my way back to you. It didn’t. It made me resent you. I didn’t think I was good enough to be with you anymore. I forgot why I started running and only saw that I was slow and the person who was supposed to support me only made me feel bad about the effort. And then I figured out that something needed to change. I was going to need to break up with one of you. And so now I ask you for a second chance to be a permanent prominent place in my life. I let the negative person go and thought I would miss them, but I still missed you. A lot! So I think we should start over. This time, with better results. Better stride, better times and most of all a better attitude over all. I want to do this for me. I want to remember running and smiling because I was having fun. I may not ever be the fastest person out there but I will always cross the finish line and know that I did something to better myself. In a way letting go of the negative “support” (tough love I think is what it was called) allowed me to have the greatest support someone can have. The support of myself. And so now I’m going to lace up my sneakers, fire up the running app and turn on some good music and just run, not fast, not far, not for anyone else but me.  I’m glad we had this talk and I can’t wait to see where our relationship goes in the future.

Yours for miles and miles,

Erin

Look to Next Year...

So here we are in December already. DECEMBER??? How did that happen? Part of me wants to just take this year and hit the delete button. I lost my dad, I was missing the passion I had for running and thought about quitting, I found out people that I thought were friends weren’t and I end the year single. But I CAN’T hit the delete button because so many great things happened.

 I got to watch an amazing little boy grow up in front of my eyes, I finally got that little sister I always wanted (Johnson that’s you!),  I graduated with my Master’s degree and celebrated with the most amazing people I know, I stood next to my best friend while she married her soul mate, I kept running, I got to go VIP to a World Series game and A Boston Bruins game, and I found out that even though life doesn’t work out the way we want it, we get the opportunity to start new every day and every year.

Next year I see good things, I see more running for sure. I have a renewed spirit for running.I I want to do another ½ marathon next year for sure. I get to run the Run to Home Base in June thanks to my company sponsoring runners and I want to finish faster than I did 2 years ago. I’ll get to meet my newest “nephew” hopefully later rather than sooner. I get to watch my niece at nationals for Cheer, which I am SO very excited about. The kid has passion for cheer and she is awesome!

I keep saying that next year has to be better than this year, but that’s unfair to this year. It wasn’t all bad, it had it’s moments. I got to spend some quality time with my mom and her cats. Oh the cats! They are lucky they are so cute or I probably would have launched one or all of them at one point. I know Milo is looking forward to seeing them go!

So as I look outside past my Christmas tree on this snowy cold night, I’m reminded of how amazing life is, how beautiful the moments are and how there is so much to look forward.

“We will open the book. Its pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. The book is called Opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.”
― Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Happiness

What does it take for someone to be happy? Someone asked me today if I’m happy. Besides the raging case of poison something I picked up this weekend I really am. I measure happiness by the people who surround me. Some people choose to measure happiness in other ways. They look at what is supposed to make them happy and then set out to duplicate it. For instance, my friend Heather and I went to a paint your own picture place on Friday night. There was a girl there who wasn’t going to be happy until her picture looked JUST LIKE THE ARTIST picture up front. I gave up about ½ way in trying to make mine look like anyone else’s, after all it was MY picture. If I would have spent all my time trying to make my picture perfect I wouldn’t have had any fun and therefore would not have been happy. I hope she got the desired result she was looking for.

I don’t need to get married to be happy. Some people look at their life and feel as if it is going to be incomplete unless they get married. Someone should not complete you (not matter what Jerry McGuire says) they should complement you. My best friend and her husband complement each other and you can see genuine happiness in their wedding pictures. I’ve seen pictures where one half of the couple look as happy as can be and the other half is gritting their teeth just to smile though it. But it’s what they THINK they need to be happy and they have convinced themselves of that. Those are usually the people you see with things that show status. They have a huge house (but not a huge family to fill it), go on expensive vacations and basically do things that are “status” quo”. If you need to convince yourself you are happy (and if you have fooled yourself into thinking you are) maybe it’s time to reevaluate your life priorities.

Sometimes we have to sort people out of our lives. You think you need them to be happy (I’m talking separate from love) and then you have the Ah-ha moment than you shouldn’t need to bend over backwards to make a friendship work. There’s a reason why Heather and I have been best friends for 18 (yikes!) years, our friendship is natural and there isn’t someone who is constantly giving or taking in the relationship. There was an episode of How I Met Your Mother where Ted really wanted Robin to come to a party so he threw it on a Friday, well she doesn’t show up and he tells her the party was really on Saturday. He so much wanted to make it work with her, he changed his plans and pretty much threw a 3 day party in the hopes she would come. That’s when you know a relationship isn’t going to work, if you are practically begging someone to hang out maybe you should rethink WHY it is you want to hang out with them.

I had 2 roommates in college. Therefore there were 3 of us in an apartment. I often say 3 is the loneliest number. Someone is going to get left out and it sure sucks to be that one. I hate being lonely so I only hang out in even numbers of friends. I’m kidding but I’ve been on the losing end of that group and I realized that I wasn’t that sad, so were they people that really made me happy? I can’t wait to go see the doctor later, now while that might not make me happy when I get the bill it will make me happy to get some itchy relief! See now that I’m finished with school I can’t help but want to still write during my lunch time. Old habits die hard!